in 1987, made two Russian words in the round, and they were great upheavals in the Soviet Union: Perestroika (rebuilding) and Glasnost (Voicing). With the second vocabulary, derived from Church Slavonic “glass” (voice), has been described a new media policy of the Kremlin, which allowed a limited amount of criticism of the situation in the country. The press was bad to denounce the functioning of structures in business and administration, but not the monopoly derKP questioning, let alone the party leadership to criticize.
for Two years, the new party chief Mikhail Gorbachev had tried previously to overcome with an anti-alcohol campaign and a disciplined campaign, in which the absence from work was punished, the duration of the crisis in the economy. Only when it became clear that both campaigns failed, he listened to his advisors, committed to internal political easing as well as limited freedom for the consumer goods industry. Also community companies with the Western capital providers contribute to the technological backwardness of the Soviet Union to catch up.
Reagan’s ally
His reforms, which was ultimately unsuccessful, were associated with a relaxation offensive in foreign policy. You a castle to the Vatican. John Paul II had been considered until then, in the Kremlin as an ally of U.S. President Ronald Reagan, whose arms programs had to reset the military-industrial complex of the Soviet Union, is technologically a little contrary. But they had also given the West European peace movement a boost in the Soviet Propaganda supported this effort. Reagan had called the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire”; he meant the Berlin wall, the Moscow-led wars in Afghanistan, Angola and Moçambique, the repressions against dissidents, as well as the support of international terrorism by the KGB. The Pope referred to at the same time Marxism as a “shame of our time”, was seen in Moscow as a confirmation for the assumption that the White house and the Vatican are pulling in the same direction.
Under Gorbachev, the official Propaganda against religion was communities. New accents were in the run-up to the Millennium of the Russian-celebrate set-Orthodox Church in 1988. The Orthodox Christians was granted to have for the development of Russian culture has made an important contribution, even if their Church had always served the ruling class. John Paul II expressed the hope to the Soviet celebrations invited.
However, both of the Moscow Patriarch Pimen of the Kiev Metropolitan Filaret, however, were strictly. They looked at the use of the Pope for the Catholics of the Eastern rite in Western Ukraine as a threat. Under Stalin, with Rome’s Uniate Church was persecuted and bloody, under his successors, she was subjected to continuing repression. Most of the churches were closed, the remaining parishes were connected forcibly to the Orthodox Church. Priests and faithful, who were in the underground worship services and religious education, he was threatened with Deportation to the Gulag.
Two events shook the Soviet bloc
After all, the Patriarchy Agostino Casaroli invited, in June 1988, traveled to the cardinal and Secretary of state of the Catholic Church at the head of a Delegation from the Vatican to Moscow. When he spoke at the reception in the Kremlin, Gorbachev on the denied freedom of religion for the traditionally Catholic Western Ukrainians, said the Kremlin chief brusquely, this is an internal affair of the Soviet Union. Casaroli gave him the opportunity to also a letter from the Pope. Gorbachev answered, however, only in August 1989.
In the meantime, two events had shaken the Soviet bloc In the economically bankrupt Poland after the years of martial law was again approved by the solidarity that emerged on the wave of enthusiasm after the first visit of the Pope to Poland in 1979 had achieved in the first semi-free elections in a landslide victory. The Catholic opponents of the regime, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, became Premier. He was an old Acquaintance of the Pope from kraków days, his first trip abroad in the new office, led him into the Kremlin, as all his predecessors had in the people’s Republic of Poland have to do, but in the Vatican.
After Poland went in the late summer of 1989, thousands of GDR citizens who wanted to leave the country in the Federal Republic of Germany. They were supervised by the Polish Caritas, and at the expense of the government, fed, ignored the protests of the GDR leadership. At the same time, the ruling reform in Hungary the Communists to dismantle the border fortifications with Austria. It was obvious that the leadership in Moscow had given the severe economic crisis of the Soviet Union’s strength and will, the Brezhnev doctrine to enforce, which allowed any country from the Eastern bloc to break out.
“I felt a special impression, as if this man is an energy outgoing.”To meet Mikhail Gorbachev
Surprisingly, Gorbachev suggested in his letter of reply, his already-planned trip to Italy to the Pope. On 1. In December 1989, came to the meeting in the Vatican, both said later that they had felt from the first Moment not only respect, but also sympathy for each other. Open the Kremlin chief said: “Without you, Holy father, would be like the Berlin wall never.” Gorbachev said later: “I felt a special impression, as if this man is a power-driven, thanks to the you feel a deep sense of trust towards him.” John Paul II said of him: “You felt that he was sincere.” He even called him a “man of Providence”, which had been brought thanks to the divine Providence in the situation, to work for peace.
The Pope encouraged the Kremlin chief in a bill on freedom of conscience to enforce; it was an ideological breakthrough, because the law was, in fact, negates the all-encompassing, leading role of the Communist party in the Soviet Union. Both sides agreed to the exchange of official representatives and ended thus, formally, the political enmity that had existed between the Vatican and the Soviet leadership since the October revolution glorious coup of the Bolsheviks in 1917.
silent about assassination
In November 1990, as now in all the satellite States of the Soviet Union, the party rule was ended, met John Paul II and Gorbachev again in the Vatican. The Kremlin chief invited on this occasion, the head of the Catholic Church to Moscow, which joined, however, to criticism on the part of the Russian Orthodox Church. Gorbachev told a little later that he had instructed the new KGB leadership, which he had enforced, a study on the Pope assassination attempt of 1981; it had, however, found no traces led to Moscow. The Pope himself spoke about the search for the men behind, never in public. His longtime private Secretary, Stanislaw Dziwisz was, however, known after his death that John Paul II was certainly assumed to be the perpetrators of the secret services of Moscow; but he had asked not only his environment, but also US President Ronald Reagan, to keep these guesses in silence. He didn’t want to the way for talks with Moscow to install, the had been always a matter of the heart.
Gorbachev had to vacate in December 1991, the Kremlin. In his memoirs, he wrote: “Everything that has happened in the last few years in Eastern Europe, would not have been possible without this Pope, without the political role he mind to play on the world level.” He praised particularly the merits of the Pope from Poland because of the revolutionary upheaval in Central and Eastern Europe, is described by the term “turning” is not only inadequate, was peaceful and successful.
The former German foreign Minister and FDP politician, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the liberal Protestants, some of it separated from the Pope, wrote after his death, John Paul II had more clearly recognized than most of the other the spiritual Dimension of the revolutions, which make him one of the “most important personalities of the 20th century. Century”. This self wrote: “It’s a simplification would be to say that the divine Providence has defeated communism. Communism collapsed as a System, in a way, of alone. He fell because of his error and of his breaches of the law. He fell because of its inherent weakness. The wood of this tree was already rotten. I had to shake it very hard.”
Created: 01.03.2020, 17:33 PM
